More Fictional Tough Guys

The Arizona Lottery likes to say in its tv ads, “You can’t win if you don’t play.” I like to think that the obverse is also true, “You can’t lose if you don’t play.” In fact, I like to think that over the last thirty or so years, I’ve won a bunch of money by not buying any lottery tickets. If I bought one a day, as a lot of people do, “d have lost almost $11,000. That makes me an $11,000 winner.

Talking Stick Resort, in Scottsdale, Arizona, has an ad that plays over and over whenever I’m watching a Phoenix Suns game. What’s so memorable about it is a quick shot of a young woman whispering sweet nothings into a man’s ear. Then her eyes shift to the right, directly into the camera. All male viewers must feel as I do: She’s looking right at me, the eternal come-on by the eternal flirt. Every time the ad comes on, I wait for that look, eternally susceptible to that glance as old as Eve.

In my essay on mystery/suspense series (March 21), I forgot to mention a few very good ones. C. J. Box has 15 novels about his Wyoming game warden, Joe Picket. Good action, great characters. P. J. Parrish (pseudonym for Kristy Montee and Kelly Nichols, two sisters who write collaboratively) has written ten novels starring a biracial p.i named Louis Kincaid. Well worth looking at. Stephen White, despite some fights with publishers, gave me a bunch of novels about the Boulder psychologist Dr. Alan Gregory and his police pal, Sam Purdy. Jeffrey Deaver began with The Bone Collector in which the forensic genius Lincoln Rhyme did his thing despite being a paraplegic. David Wiltsie provided the rock climbing FBI agent John Becker in a good series about catching really bad psychopaths. Lawrence Block, whom I mentioned as the author of the Matt Scudder series, also gave us the anti-hero Keller, a hit man who, despite his occupation, makes us side with him. Laura Lippman wrote a bunch about Tess Monaghan. And, how could I forget one of the masters of prose, James Lee Burke, who introduced me to the Louisiana cop/private eye, Dave Robicheaux. All of these, as well as those mentioned in my earlier blog, are worth reading, more than worth reading. Find them. Read them. You won’t be disappointed. You’ll be as intrigued as I am with that Talking Stick lady.

Fictional Tough Guys

I read quite a bit, but for the last twenty years or so I’ve read exclusively in the mystery/action/suspense genre. Except for all the British horse racing novels by Dick Francis, my wife was mostly too busy or too disinterested to read, but lately she’s taken it up. Nasty habit, reading. When you get hooked that’s about all you want to do. She had never read any of the Ed McBain stuff, so I started her on the Matthew Hope series, thirteen novels about a Florida lawyer who just can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Or trouble keeps finding him. She raced her way through that series and then I started feeding her the 87th Precinct series with McBain’s memorable cast of characters set in a fictional New York. She’s now starting the 44th with ten to go. Keeps her out of mischief. The 87th Precinct series was always one of my favorites, and as I do with most writers I like, I read them and then re-read them, sometimes more than twice. I’ve read both McBains twice, the John Sandford Prey series twice, the Parker Spensers and Jesse Stones and Suunny Randalls all twice, the Lee Child’s Jack Reachers twice, all of the Dick Francis books twice, the Lawrence Block Matt Scudders twice, and my favorite of all, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series four times. Yeah, you could say I’m compulsive. I read the McGee series so often because I was trying to get a handle on MacDonald’s style and all the biographical details of Travis McGee in order to write the final in the series about this iconic tough guy, a novel I would call The Black Widow. But MacDonald’s son didn’t want anyone to touch his father’s legacy. I couldn’t feel too bad about his denial since he’d also said no Stephen King about doing the same thing. Right now I’m just beginning my second reading of Robert Crais’s series about Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, an obvious West Coast copy of Parker’s Spenser. I’ve read nearly all of what Stephen King has written, but he seems to be able to write faster than I can read. And Dean Koontz the same. A long time ago I began James Patterson’s Alex Cross series, but Patterson became so stupidly bloody that I gave him up, and he’s since become so commercial he writes four or five a year in collaboration with four or five other people. No thanks. I still have Michael Connelly and his Harry Bosch, Jonathan Kellerman and his Alex Delaware, James W. Hall and his Thorn, Kathy Reichs and her Temperance Brennan. What more do I need? I need more young authors with tough guy main characters. All the authors of my past preferences are dead or dying. If you’re looking for something to read and have never encountered any of the people I’ve mentioned, go there and rejoice.

Movie Memories

I’m a big movie fan. I’ve always been a big movie fan. I can’t even guess how many films I’ve seen over the years, but since I’ve got a lot of years on my odometer, it must be a lot of films. Often, when a movie or the people in it grab my attention, I’ll see it more than once, sometimes even three or four times. I remember when I first saw Joanne Woodward do her triple thing in Three Faces of Eve, I just had to see it twice more just to watch how she did it. The same thing happened with East of Eden. Not that James Dean was a great actor, but he was so different I wanted to share in his youthful infatuation with Julie Harris, so I sat through it twice in a row. Three times for the Gershwein score and the Gene Kelly dancing and the vision of the young Leslie Caron in An American in Paris. For Brando in maybe his best performance ever in On the Waterfront four times. And, yes, like a lot of Brando fans, I too tried to memorize some of his lines: (Terry to his brother Charlie): “You don’t understand. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.” Three viewings of Young at Heart just to hear a scrawny Sinatra sing “One More for the Road.” You get the idea. I’m a little OCD when it comes to movies. The only other person I know that’s like that is my old teaching pal Anne Smith. She and I could talk movies for hours. I’m a bit older than she is, so my memories go back further than hers. I store vivid images from old old movies: Gary Cooper licking his thumb and applying it to the front sight of his rifle as he turkey calls Germans out of hiding in the WWI epic Sergeant York. I see the two choices the girl had when she was returning home, the dark tunnel and the moonlit street and she mistakenly chose the light and then the sight of blood dripping under the door casing when she didn’t make it home in The Black Panther. I see it vividly in my memory, but when I went to the IMDB web site to confirm it, there was no sign of a movie like that or named that. Did I make it up? Did I just imagine that scene? I don’t know. But I can still see that page flip over by some ghostly hand in The Uninvited. I see that bottle of booze Ray Milland hid in the ceiling light fixture in Lost Weekend. I was shocked when Jan Sterling removed her makeup and wig in The High and the Mighty. I still hear Brandon DeWilde calling out to Alan Ladd in Shane, “Shane, come back,!” I see Richard Widmark pushing his mother down a flight of stairs in her wheelchair, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the movie was. I remember the Indians leaping out of hiding from the holes in the desert to ambush Robert Taylor and others in Ambush. I see Humphrey Bogart rolling those ball bearings in his hand as he visibly went bananas in The Caine Mutiny. I watched in relief when Cornell Wilde waved back to his African pursuer in Naked Prey. I toiled wearily along with Gregory Peck on his long trek across The Purple Plain. I hear more than see the action as Tyrone Power swashed and buckled his way through Mexico in Captain from Castille, hearing Alfred Newman’s “Conquest,” so entranced by that theme that I went out and bought a recording of it. I choked down all those hard boiled eggs along with Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. I fell in love over and over again with the girls and women of those early shows: Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver, Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain, Elizabeth Taylor in Black Beauty, Gene Tierney in Laura (in love so much that I talked my wife into naming our second daughter Laura, only to fall out of love with the awful Gene Tierney when she hooked her foot in the rug at the top of the stairs to fall down and abort her child in Leave Her to Heaven), and of course, Julia Roberts, the pretty woman all male viewers fell in love with in Pretty Woman, and the young Scarlet Johannson that both Bill Murray and I fell in love with in Lost in Translation. I’m such a fickle lover. I laughed along with all the comics of that long ago time: Danny Kaye in The Court Jester, Abbot and Costello with their “Who’s on First” routine first seen in The Naughty Nineties, Abbot and Costello with their “Slowly I turned” routine in Lost in a Harem, the “I believe in the power of voodoo” routine that I and my buddies kept alive in our youths but I can’t remember where we first heard it. Who were the male stars I admired? Tyrone Power even though he was in the closet at the time, Burt Lancaster and his acrobatics, Kirk Douglas and his gritted teeth, Bill Holden in almost anything but especially Picnic, Stalag 17, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Blue Knight, of course John Wayne in almost anything but especially The Quiet Man, and the other old blue eyes Paul Newman, especially in The Long Hot Summer, The Left Handed Gun, The Hustler, Hud, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting. Have I missed any? Well, certainly. But I’m old and forgetful. One last word about a movie that broke my heart more than any other. Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford fell in love and then fell out of love in The Way We Were, and I felt to the quick the poignancy of lost time and lost opportunity and lost love that this film dramatized. Life is short and this movie brought it home to me with a sledgehammer. I love movies. Until I die I’ll continue to go there for the popcorn and the darkened theatres and the escape they provide. You should too.

Band Concert

Last night we went to Glendale for our grandson’s band concert. He’s thirteen, just finishing the eighth grade, and has been playing the trumpet for four years. He’s taking after his grandmother’s family, who were practically all great players of the trumpet. Four years ago we’d given him my old cornet, the horn that I’d started playing almost seventy years ago. A local music store gave it new life, restoring its luster, unsticking the stuck valves, making it more playable than it was when I played it not very well those many years ago. He gave it two years before deciding he wanted a trumpet instead of the noticeably shorter cornet. Ah, the vagaries of youth. He’s tall, handsome, and extremely bright. This is not a grandfather saying what all grandparents say about their grandchildren. This kid really is all those accolades above. He’s representative of most young people today—taller, better looking, and smarter than my generation. They’re products of better nutrition and the information age. I can’t remember what I was like at his age, but I’m certain I wasn’t as well informed as he is. Back to the concert. It was held in the middle school gym with folding chairs along the sidewalls and bleachers at the back. We were unfortunate enough that we had to sit in the bleachers. Oh, my. Narrow bleacher seats made of the hardest wood I’ve ever experienced, and it wasn’t long before my butt began to complain. William, the tall, good-looking, bright grandson, had mentioned before we got there that the concert would probably last about two hours. As I sat on those steel-hard bleacher seats, I kept glancing at my watch to see how much time had passed. Not nearly enough. William was performing in a jazz ensemble on the stage, with what looked like hundreds of other musicians seated on the floor of the gym. The jazz group performed adequately but not greatly, with William and a sax player doing brief standup solos. The jazz wasn’t very jazzy with too much depending on too few notes repeated too many times. But they are young, and better jazz talent would come later in their lives. They were followed by a percussion/Stomp group with about a dozen drummers banging away on assorted plastic containers. I was impressed. I checked my watch: twenty minutes had passed oh so slowly. The concert action then moved to the gym floor, where what looked like hundreds of little people, sixth through eighth, were seated, waiting for their turn to perform. The reason for so many kids was the addition of two middle school bands from other nearby middle schools, invited for this concert. There were some twenty squeaky violins, about fifteen trumpets, eleven flutes in the front row, a scattering of other instruments, and only one trombone that I could spot. Is the trombone on the list of endangered species? Is the cornet an ignominious leftover from the past? Is the flute this generation’s instrument of choice? I noticed the faint aroma of sweaty children that I remembered from my years of teaching. Not necessarily unpleasant, just odorifically memorable. I checked my watch again. Yikes! Only forty minutes gone. I wanted to stand up, stretch my back, rub my butt, climb down from that fourth row bleacher seat, but I was hemmed in by too many other bleacherites and had to just sit there and take it. By this time, I could no longer feel my lower extremities and even if I’d been able to stand, I’d probably have pitched forward onto someone’s back or head. How embarrassing would that have been? I heaved a sigh and concentrated on the little people before me. They were all quite well-behaved, and some of them couldn’t be called little people. Many of the girls were tall and beautiful, and they had boobs. What are seventh and eighth grade girls doing with boobs? What must middle school boys think of those girls with boobs? Probably the same thing I once thought, what boys since the beginning of time have thought. The bands each played one selection separately, then one that included all of them. They played surprisingly well. When the combined groups finished their number, the director, a very young but very capable fellow who looked like he should have been playing IN the band instead of directing it, turned to us and bowed, then handed the mike over to the middle school principal, who thanked us all for coming to the concert, for supporting our sons and daughters, our grandsons and granddaughters. I looked at my watch as he waved his goodbye to us: just under an hour. And we were free after just an hour and not the dreaded two hours William had prophesied. I love music, I love William, but I think this may be my last band concert.

American Idol

We’ve been watching American Idol for all thirteen seasons, and nearly every year I complain about one thing or another—those irritating waving arms down front during a contestant’s song, that irritating audience noise during a contestant’s song, that irritatingly too loud band and backup singers during a contestant’s song, the inane and often meaningless comments from the judges, the nearly always awful song choices the contestants make. Then there’s Randy Jackson. I thought we were rid of him and his “Hey, Dog” when he stepped down, but this year he’s back as some sort of mentor to the contestants. I never did understand what his credentials were that qualified him as a musical judge or a mentor. And I still don’t. The judges seem to be more interested in how the contestants perform than how they sing, and this year they aren't singing very well. But despite my complaints, the final eight or ten contestants each season were always good enough to listen to. And despite Keith and Jennifer and Harry’s stock comments that this year’s group is excellent, I think that any of the top four or five from any of the previous seasons is better than any of the final twelve this season. Where is this year’s Jennifer Hudson or Carrie Underwood or Adam Lambert? Where’s Fantasia’s “Summertime”? Where’s Kelly Clarkson’s “A Moment Like This”? Where’s Katherine McPhee’s “Over the Rainbow”? This year, neither the quality of those past contestants nor the quality of the past song selections is anywhere to be found. And after last week’s set of stinky performances, we also aren’t going to be anywhere to be found.

Spotify

One of the most pleasant features I’ve found on my new iPad is a music app called “Spotify,” with an insane amount of music from which I can choose. In the old days of music listening we had records, then tapes, then cds with twelve to eighteen tracks on each disc, then MP3 discs with about two hundred tracks. We could put in ear buds for listening to our tapes and discs, set it to shuffle, and away we went, our heads filled with song for an entire day, free from the babble of too many smart (or dumb) phones around us. Now I have Sirius radio in my car and on my television with an almost infinite number of radio stations on my computer that let me choose from any number of musical styles and artists. And now I have Spotify. This is a web site where I can select a playlist that someone has placed on the site with anywhere from thirty to several hundred tracks of their favorites within a specific genre of music. And there are hundreds of different playlists. One I really like is called “Jazzy Romance,”with mostly female jazz singers, some of whom I’m already familiar with and a bunch I’ve never heard of. Those familiar to me: Karrin Allyson, Stacey Kent, Jane Monheit, Norah Jones, Natalie Cole. Some I’ve heard of but never heard, like Amy Winehouse singing an old Gershwin, “Someone to Watch over Me,” Nicole Henry with a wonderful song called “Make It Last,” Melody Gardot and “My One and Only Thrill.” And a bunch of singers who’ve been hiding from me: Sos Fenger, Marie Bergman, Margareta Bengtson, Sinne Eeg, Caecilie Norby, Malene Mortensen, and Térez Montcalm. From the spellings of those names, I can only assume they’re from well out of this country, but they all sing in English. I guess that speaks well of the influence our singers and songwriters have on the musicians of the world. There’s a galaxy of music out there just waiting for us, and we don’t have enough hours in our lives to listen to it all. But it’s now available on our television hookups, our computers, our iPods and iPads, our smart phones and our dumb phones. I recommend to anyone who might be reading this, anyone who loves music as I do, that they go to the Apple app store and download “Spotify.”

PB & J Oscars

That had to be one of the blandest Oscars I've ever seen. Ellen was okay but not very funny nor very surprising. The biggest surprise was when she ordered in three boxes of pizza and then handed out pieces to a few of the audience. Dumb and classless. The whole show was a little like eating a peanut butter & jelly sandwich on very white bread, tastes pretty good but not very exotic and really forgettable. My mouth was all set for duck a l'orange or Beef Wellington and I get a pb & j. Gravity's Cuarón won for best director and the movie grabbed a bunch of the peripheral stuff, but 12 Years a Slave got best picture. Everyone else was pretty much predictable. The acceptance speeches were mercifully brief with the best Kate Blanchett's for her win as best actress in Blue Jasmine. The four songs up for best original song were emminently unsingable, with the Frozen "Let It Go" the winner. But where in this last decade are the songs that stick around and around and we all know and can sing them? Pink reminded us of great songs from the movies when she sang "Over the Rainbow," the winner 75 years ago. And one could go tripping through nearly all the winning songs from the last 65 years of the 21st century and know them and be able to sing them from memory. For example, "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing," "All the Way," "Mona Lisa," "Moon River," "Days of Wine and Roses," "The Shadow of Your Smile," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," "For All We Know," "The Way We Were," "Evergreen," and "Beauty and the Beast." And then we get to the songs of this century: "Things Have Changed," "If I Didn't Have You," "Lose Yourself," "Into the West," "Al Otro Lado Del Rio" (I'd defy anyone to tell me they can hum this one), and one of the all time mistakes in this category, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." I think you get the idea. They should look at how Neil Patrick Harris has hosted the Tony Awards. Now there's a classy awards show, and no one has ever hosted anything better than Harris has. Let's hope the producers for the Academy Awards learned something from this year's debacle.

Oscar Buzz & Monuments Men

A rimshot comment about the upcoming Oscars: Dustin Hoffman claims his Tootsie role is better than Jay Leto’s Rayon in The Dallas Buyers Club. Leto seeks redress for the remark. But Jaye Davidson cries out that his role as Dil in The Crying Game takes them both by surprise.

Tonight’s Oscar show may be the most exciting in years, exciting in that so many of the films are all so good and the race for best actor/actress and supporting actor/actress are all so close. Let’s just say that all of them deserve to win. The buzz in the news seems to suggest that 12 Years a Slave will clean up in most of the categories. I hope not. 12 Years was a powerful examination of our nation’s most disgraceful chapter, our willing enslavement of other human beings. It needed to be said, and it was said powerfully, graphically, painfully. But was it the best film of 2013? I don’t think so. I’ll say gravely that Gravity should win it. I’m also looking forward to seeing Ellen as host. This isn’t her first time hosting the show, and she’ll certainly be better than the forgetable host a year ago, Seth MacFarlane, or three years ago with James Franco and Anne Hathaway. Now, there was a double stinker. Or maybe in the future they should just go with a proven winner as host, Billy Crystal, who has run the show eight times and made us laugh every time.

Quick note about a reasonably good film that should have been better, The Monuments Men, with a great cast that got misused—George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Bill Murray, and Jean Dujardin. This film was based on a true story about a small squad of older men who tried to save the art stolen by Hitler during WWII. Clooney directed, and he went wrong by using a humorous tone, especially at the beginning, when a humorous tone wasn’t needed or necessary or effective. Great actor and director that Clooney is, I’d have thought he’d know better.

Winter Olyimpics Finale

Thankfully, the Games are coming to an end. And, thankfully, coming to an end without any terrorist activity in Sochi. Maybe the Russian security was better than I thought it would be or maybe the terrorists just didn’t want to make a statement at this time, in that place. Either way, it’s a good thing. What did I learn from these Games? Now I know what a twizzle is, and no one does a twizzle better than our two golden ice dancers, Charlie White and Meryl Davis. She looks like a porcelain doll and he like Prince Charming, but are they ever elegant when they dance across the ice, with their twizzles impeccably timed.

What else will I take from these Games? The bobsled races seem to depend too much on how the two or four in the sled get started and how well their sleds perform. It would be a more reliable test of the driver’s skill if they didn’t have the initial push, just let gravity begin the run, with one or three sacks of potatoes instead of the one or three pushers, and all the teams having to use the same sled. Then the results would depend entirely on the skill of the driver. Actually, I don’t care how they do it. It’s a silly event. I’m not a hockey fan so the hockey results aren’t as traumatic for me as for the American men’s and women’s teams that lost to the Canadians.

The most interesting thing about the figure skating was the reexamination of the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan brouhaha twenty years ago.

Now, Tonya is unattractively fat and Nancy is extremely attractive with steel grey eyes and a set mouth when she speaks of Tonya Harding.

One of the most exciting events is the speed skating around and around the ice palace. I can't figure out how they maintain their balance when they zoom around the corners nearly sidways. Four years down the road we can all go to South Korea for the 2018 Games. I’m constantly amazed at how far South Korea has come from the nation I visited over sixty years ago, a nation with the omnipresent odor of the honey buckets, the barrenness of the bombed out hillsides, the impoverished country villages with their straw huts. Now we find a thriving, democratic nation that produces wonderful automobiles and dominant female golfers. And just to the north, we find the megalomaniacal ruler of a starving nation. Amazing.

Pet Peeves

Pet peeves. So many to examine, so little time. Each time I go to any of our grocery stores or to CostCo and see people push a cart to their car, unload their stuff, and then shove the cart up into a bush or flower bed or just leave it in their empty space, even though there’s a cart repository no more than five steps away, I get pissed. I want to rush up before they can drive away and slam a cart into their rear ends. I don’t succumb to the urge, but it’s what I’d like to do. Then there are all the excessively tattooed basketball players, both college and NBA. What statement are they making with all that ink on necks and shoulders? I guess it’s the same as all the long hair and free love and dippy clothes of the Seventies, a finger in the air aimed at the establishment. Then there are the drivers in our senior community. They’re old, yes, but so many of them are so stupid. I’m guessing they were stupid young drivers. They don’t know how to stop at stop lights, or signal turns (or too often forget to turn their signals off after a turn), or signal a right turn and then turn left, or drive faster than 20 in a 45 mph zone, or drive slower than 60 in a 45 mph zone. When all our snow birds are here and our streets and parking lots are overflowing with senior drivers, one takes his life in his hands when one ventures out among them. Thank God I’m one of the non-stupid drivers. A long time ago I wrote a short essay on Pennsylvania drivers who drove me crazy whenever I'd drive to the golf course where I was a member. It was just over the Pennsylvania line from my home in upstate New York, back roads Pennsylvania, and the back country would come out to plague me.

"Pennsylvania Drivers"

Pet peeves, the things that bug us the most. Everybody’s got at least one and I guess you could say I have more than my share. But there’s one that really red-flags me. You see, patience has never been one of my virtues. And Pennsylvania drivers make me want to rip my hair. I have this theory that the only Pennsylvanians who get drivers licenses are the ones who don’t pass the road test.

I live in New York, fairly close to Pennsylvania, but I golf at a course just across the border near Warren, so I spend a lot of time on the two-lane roads from Lakewood through New York and Pennsylvania to the course. And almost every time I’m going or returning, I can count on one or more Pennsylvania caravans—little bunches of three to ten cars all tootling down the road at 43 mph, all bunched up behind the lead car, all doing 43. Not 42, not 44, but 43 right on the money—nobody ever passing anybody else because I swear Pennsylvanians think that’s illegal. So there I’ll be fuming at the back of the pack, and the Pennsylvanians ahead of me—oblivious to me and my anger, oblivious to just about everything—are just as pleased as punch.

I’ve noticed, whenever I’m stuck behind a Pennsylvania car, that the occupants really seem to enjoy eyeballing the scenery and conversing with each other. I watch them there ahead of me, their heads bobbing back and forth, looking out the side windows at the countryside, then back to look at each other. Apparently they can’t talk without eye contact. But they never look in their rearview mirrors. They haven't the foggiest there’s a guy behind them about to have a seizure, a guy who at any moment might go berserk and smash into their backsides. They just go on tootling down the road, and in my mind I hear Mortimer Snerd going, “Dum de dum de dum, uh yupp, uh huh, yupp. Oh, hey, look, Ethyl, the Johnsons got a new yard ornament—a stuffed bear bendin’ over the garbage can. Uh, yupp, that sure is cute all right. Goes really good with the mallard wind gauge ‘n’ the butterfly on the garage door. Uh yupp, uh huh, ‘n’ I always hafta chuckle when I see that wooden cutout of the lady bendin’ over the flower garden ‘n’ that cute little wooden schnauzer sniffin’ her bottom. Oh yeah, that’s a good un. Dum de dum de dum. Whattay think, Ethel? Wanna drive on over ta the mall in Lakewood ‘n’ look around? Maybe go ta Ponderosa fer dinner? Let’s see, fifteen miles from here. Shouldn’t take us more’n half hour or so. You game, Ethyl?”

And any time I see a car making some strange maneuver, I can almost count on its having a Pennsylvania plate—you know, the old “You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania” plate. Whenever I see a car signaling a left turn from the right lane, I go out of my way to check it out. Sure enough, blue plate, and almost always a little old couple in front and another in back, both ladies with carefully coifed blue hair. Or if I get stuck behind a car doing 25 in a 40 mph zone, I just know who it must be. They feel obligated to go ten to fifteen slower than the posted limit. It’s the same principle that applies when they see a 30 mph curve sign. They follow those instructions to the letter—no, I mean ten letters less. And down hills no matter how steep or gentle the grade. Any time I see someone’s brake lights blinking on-off, on-off, on-off going down a hill, I just know it’s a Pennsylvania dingdong.

Just yesterday, going west on Fairmount Avenue, I noticed a car right-turning into Ponderosa. Pennsylvanians love Ponderosa and will drive hundreds of miles from remote Pennsylvania outposts just to come to the one in Lakewood. The car was tootling a nice safe 5 mph for the turn, making a big surprise loop out to the left before turning right.

“Heh, heh, heh, uh yupp. Gotta keep them nervous New Yorkers on their toes, Ethyl.”

Sure enough, true to form—they turned into the Exit, much to the consternation of a driver just leaving.

“Oh, hey, Ethyl, ya see that nice man wave ta us from his car? They sure wave funny in New York, though, with just that one finger. Uh yupp, uh huh, dum de dum de dum.”

Winter Olympics

The Winter Games are about half over, and I must confess I haven’t been watching as much of it as I used to. I like the Summer Games much better. I can understand nearly al the Summer events whereas I either don’t understand or don’t care about too many of the Winter events. Last night the winner in the men’s 1000-meter speed skating was decided by three thousandth of a second. I find that nearly ludicrous. And the American skating team sort of half complains about the new suits they’re wearing, sort of half blaming their poor showing on the suits. Come on, guys and girls, it ain’t the suits that win or lose the skating events. Then there’s the luge and skeletons. I still can’t figure out how much skill goes into those events and how much depends on the sleds. Folks willing to slide down an icy trough at 90 mph with chins only inches above the ice or aiming the damn things with their toes are beyond my understanding. I’d rather watch paint dry than watch all the ski jumping, or any of the curling or bobsledding, or most of the hockey or cross-country skiing or biathlon or Nordic combined. Part of my disinterest is that everything we see is tape-delayed. The excitement of winning or losing has already taken place. And too often we’re made aware of the winners and losers before we get to watch the events. Anyone on the Internet has to look away when that stuff is announced without any spoiler alerts. Even Brian Williams on the Nightly News can spoil a few events for us. I remember how angry I was in watching the Summer Games in Atlanta in 1996.

Kerri Strug did that injured-ankle vault to help the American women gymnasts win the team gold. Our local news station just couldn’t wait to tell us all about it . . . about two hours ahead of the taped coverage. I wrote the station a very angry letter, and I’m sure they got a bunch more than one. So, what exactly do I care about in these games? The figure skating, the snowboarding, the downhill skiing, that strange short track speed skating, and the women’s bobsledding in which Lolo Jones is competing.

I guess that makes me a Summer Soldier and a Sunshine Patriot. Oh, yes, and one last Winter comment that also goes for the Summer: I wish they’d deemphasize the national medal counts. It just sounds too chauvinistic, too much national chest pounding when it should be about the individuals, regardless of nationality.

Sochi & Ice Storms

A word about the weather. The Southeast is learning all about ice storms and skating rink highways, and Sochi is learning all about mushy mountainsides that make snowboarding and downhill skiing a dangerous sport.

The tv shots of the ice in Atlanta and most of North and South Carolina remind me of Frost’s poem “Birches,” in which the truth of bowed birches isn’t that boys have been swinging on them but that ice storms have caused them to bend, ice storms that, when the sun comes out and the temperatures rise, make the world look like the “inner dome of heaven” has fallen. Oh, how I love that poem. Love it as much as the Atlantans hate the stuff about which it was written.

And then there’s Sochi, with the Olympic ski and snowboard participants falling on their butts or crashing into safety nets when their skis or boards can’t navigate the slushy slopes.

I know, I know, they all have to face the same conditions, but in these conditions the best don’t always win the gold. Shaun White is a good example. He’d have won if the snow had been snow, if at the bottom of a trick his board had been able to grab the snow as it’s supposed to. Sounds like sour grapes on my part. At least I’m thankful that no idiot terrorists have yet struck these Games. Yet.

Sochi & Breaking Bad

The Winter Games begin tonight, but it wouldn’t be a game to be in Sochi right now. Putin can say all he wants about the security he’ll have in place, but I’d still be afraid to go there. And not just the threat to my life. Also the threat to my identity and financial records. It seems that the Russian hackers can now grab all that information the minute you step off a plane and use any electronic devices. No wonder they still have so many tickets to sell for the various venues. No thanks. I’ll stay here and watch it on the tube. And if Sochi needs any more snow, we could always send some of ours that keeps falling and falling in the north and east.

I’m looking forward to the team figure skating as something new. Also looking forward to seeing Lolo Jones in the bobsled. Not that I give a shuck for bobsledding. I just want to see Lolo. The women’s ski jump should be good. It’s about time the Olympic committee finally agreed to consider women as being athletes enough for that event. Every year, every Olympic Games, both summer and winter, we realize that women are not fragile creatures who have to be protected from the rigors of a sport that was once considered only a male event. Think boxing and hockey, think weightlifting. Someday we may even see an end to the male/female categories, with mixed competition, the best competitors or team members regardless of gender. Maybe even see male pregnancies. That will finally signal equality of the sexes. Don’t laugh. These days, anything’s possible.

We’re still whistling through Breaking Bad. That really is an amazing series, so many unexpected twists and turns, so much really great acting. Nearly all of the characters have some good, some bad in them (pretty much like all of us). Walt seems to want to protect Jesse but he also allowed Jesse’s girlfriend to die of a heroin overdose when he might have saved her. But she was a menace to his and Jesse’s meth dealing, so he let her die. And Skyler has decided to overlook the money her boss seems to have misappropriated. The lies keep piling up, the tension keeps growing. We’re just starting Season Three. Thank you, NetFlix.

James Lee Burke

Several times on this blog I’ve written about author James lee Burke, praising him for his sensory style, for his interesting characters Dave Robicheau and Clete Purcell, for his recreation of the scents and sights of New Orleans and Louisiana. In his latest Robicheau novel, The Light of the World, this one set in Montana, an aging Dave Robicheau reflects on life and death. Here are a few of his reflections:

“At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself—the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in each sunrise?”

“Life had no value if it didn’t contain love. Was there any worse fate than not loving another and not being loved in turn? If the color gray could be applied to an emotional condition, it was a life without affection or human warmth. “

“Age is a clever thief. It takes a little from you each day, so you’re not aware of your loss until it’s irreversible.”

Here’s a fitting example of that sensory style I mentioned, especially when it applies to his beloved Louisiana:

“I have always loved and welcomed the rain, even though sometimes the spirits of the dead visit me inside it. During the summer, when I was a child, no matter how hot the weather was, there was a shower almost every afternoon at three o’clock. The southern horizon would be piled with storm clouds that resembled overripe plums, and within minutes you would feel the barometer plunge and see the oak trees become a deeper green and the light become the color of brass. You could smell the salt in the wind and an odor that was like watermelon that had burst open on a hot sidewalk. Suddenly, the wind would shift and the oak trees would come to life, leaves swirling and Spanish moss straightening on the limbs. Just before the first raindrops fell, Bayou Teche would be dimpled by bream rising to feed on the surface. No more than a minute later, the rain would pour down in buckets, and the surface of the Teche would dance with a hazy yellow glow that looked more like mist than rain.
For me the rain was always a friend. I think that is true of almost all children. They seem to understand its baptismal nature, the fashion in which it absolves and cleanses and restores the earth. The most wonderful aspect of the rain was its cessation. After no longer than a half hour, the sun would come out, the air would be cool and fresh, the four o’clocks would be opening in the shade, and that evening there would be a baseball game in City Park. The rain was part of a testimony that assured us the summer was somehow eternal, that even the coming of the darkness could be held back by the heat lightning that flickered through the heavens after sunset.”

And finally, another of Dave’s thoughts about life and death:

“What is the sum total of a man’s life? I knew the answer, and it wasn’t complicated. At the bottom of the ninth, you count up the people you love, both friends and family, and you add their names to the fine places you’ve been and the good things you’ve done, and you have it.”

I and Dave have a kinship. Too often of late I feel like I’m in the ninth, hoping for the game to go into extra innings. I feel like I’ve still got a few homeruns in me, but at my present age, it’s not likely I can ever hit one out of the park, maybe just a couple of bloopers over the infield or an accidental bunt that goes for a hit. But when I add in all the loved places and loved people in my life, and the good things I've done, the number comes out satisfactorily high. And with that extended sports metaphor, I and Dave say goodbye to whatever readers we have.

Breaking Bad

This is my 800th blog post. My first post was September 2, 2009. Whoa! That's over four years ago. I guess 800 nicely rounds out my 80 years. I wonder if I'll be up for another 800 posts . . . or another 80 years. Probably not. In both cases. Writing a blog is sort of like the selfie photos people take with their cell phones, a narcissistic exercise in trying to get attention. Please forgive my narcissism. I hope I haven't bored anyone. I hope I've had some faithful readers. In either case or in any case, here comes number 800.

Thanks to NetFlix, we recently climbed aboard the Breaking Bad bandwagon and though the ride can be bumpy at times, there’s no way anyone is going to get us off until we see the final segment. And, thank you, Breaking Bad, for not feeling compelled to insert background music. No musical intrusion as with too many television series, NCIS the most obvious offender. We don’t need a musical score to lead us by the hand to appropriate emotional responses. It’s like comedies that try to elicit laugher by sticking in a laugh track. Don’t need it, don’t want it. Breaking Bad has received more critical acclaim than any other show. We now understand why. The writing is excellent with unexpected twists and turns in plot development. The characters are excellent, three-dimensional people with all the warts showing. Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is a good man whom circumstances turn bad. He’s a high school science teacher who has lung cancer and has huge medical bills and, his doctor assures him, only two years to live. To accumulate enough money for his medical expenses and a nest egg for his family after he dies, he embarks on a career as a meth cooking drug lord.

The viewer likes him even though he’s doing great harm to those who buy his product. He partners with Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), a pot-head ex-student. The viewer likes Jesse despite his drugginess and unsavory meth dealings with really unsavory drug distributors. All the characters have good and bad sides. Skyler White (Anna Gunn), Walter’s wife, is forty and expecting a surprise gift of a baby girl. Her sister Marie (Betsy Brandt), married to DEA agent Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), is a kleptomaniac. Hank, although working on the side of the good guys, is an unlikeable loudmouth. We’re only finishing up the second season, and we can’t wait to see the rest of the story. Breaking Bad is really Breaking Good.

And speaking of good television, we can’t wait for the return of The Americans and The Bates Motel. In the old days, a series would run for nearly eight months before hitting us with a cliff-hanger finale, then go off the air for four months before returning to get us off that cliff. Yeah, eight months on and then four off. Now, a series like Americans and Bates runs for only ten or twelve episodes before saying goodbye for what feels like forever. One needs a really good memory to wait for six or eight months before picking up their stories when they return. I guess what we should do is wait for NetFlix to make them available and then watch them in a NetFlix marathon. Too much to see, too little time.

Super Bowl Sunday

Sunday, sweet Sunday. Clear skies, calm air, and mid-seventies. Life here in Arizona is just too good. Then there’s the upper tier—the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois—freezing. The Northeast and Southeast, freezing. California, burning. New Jersey shoveling snow out of the Super Bowl stadium. I still don’t understand why the powers-that-be decided to schedule this game for a wintry east coast. I think a cold venue might favor a defense over an offense, therefore Seattle over Denver. I hope that doesn’t prove true. I want Peyton Manning to prove that he’s the greatest quarterback ever. He deserves it. Next Sunday. Should be fun. And the Phoenix Garbage Can Open will lead into it. Possible as many as half a million people will go to the TPC party. Lots of beer, lots of screaming and jeering at that infamous par-3 16th. This is the hole where players like Bubba Watson actually encourage the fans to shout as loud as they like when the golfer is in his backswing. It’s the hole where the caddies race off the tee to see which can get to the green first. The PGA officials have tried to put an end to this race because of the danger to the caddies, lugging a very heavy golf bag as they run. I think the caddies may decide to continue the practice despite what the officials say. Next Sunday should prove to be a fun day—football and golf. What more could I ask for? Well, I guess I might ask for a celebratory pizza. That would be nice.

Academy Awards 2014

Another Oscar night on the horizon. It seems like they appear more often than once a year. Or maybe it’s because we have so many award shows leading up to the Academy Awards: The People’s Choice, The Golden Globes, and the SAG Awards. And all of them give us a feel for where the voting is going. This year’s crop of films seems more bountiful than in recent years, and, I’m happy to say, I’ve seen all of the nine nominated for best picture. It looks like American Hustle will win it, even though I don’t think it’s the best of the year. My alternate pick is Gravity, but too many voters will think the story was too thin to win. I loved Her, but even Scarlet can't make it a winner. A lot of the votes will go to 12 Years a Slave, partly because it was a very good film, partly because a bunch of the voters (mostly white) will feel guilt over the awfulness of the slavery issue depicted in it, and will vote for it out of shame. Maybe I’m wrong on that, but it seems we still can’t, as a nation, free ourselves from that awful time in our past. Even though we get closer and closer to a total acceptance of all people regardless of the color of their skin, we still have a black/white issue. And that issue will show its ugly head in the voting for this year’s best film, maybe even extending to the voting for best actors and supporting actors. My dark horse pick is Dallas Buyers Club, but that one shows us a time in our past that a lot of us would rather forget, the HIV and Aids epidemic in the Eighties that took so many lives. But damn, did McConaughey and Leto ever carry that picture, which is why I think Matthew McConaughey will win best actor and Jared Leto will win best supporting actor. The best actor category has five people, any of whom could win and no one would think it was an upset: Christian Bale is great in Hustle; Chiwetel Ejiofor is great in 12 Years a Slave; Leonardo DiCaprio is great in Wolf of Wallstreet (Leo the actor is great, the character he portrays is disgusting); and Bruce Dern is great in Nebraska. So, who’s going to win? The odds still favor McConaughey. The five women up for best actress are equally excellent, but of the five, Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine should win in a walk. But then, there’s always Meryl Streep in the rearview mirror. Best supporting actress is a little more confusing. Julia Roberts in August: Osage County will probably win just because she’s Julia, but Sally Hawkins from Blue Jasmine might sneak in there. That leaves best director. David O. Russell will probably win for American Hustle, but I think Steve McQueen will win it for 12 Years a Slave. I don’t have a clue about all those other categories. We’ll see on March 2.

Mobridge, South Dakota

Isn’t it odd how we can never truly cut the ties to the place where we grew up? Every time we return to our South Dakota hometown, Mobridge, we see so many changes that it no longer seems like our town, and we both say we’ll never return. But we do. High school class reunions have in the past been the reason to go back, and we still had relatives living there, and a few friends from the past. But every year there were fewer and fewer friends, fewer relatives, and the rolls of our two graduating classes kept diminishing, and most of those still alive were too fragile to make the trip.

On our last trip there, for my sixtieth reunion, I had an afternoon free from social obligations, so I drove west across the bridge and over to visit Tatanka Iotake on his granite pedestal, known to most as Sitting Bull. With only the nearby monument to Sacajawea, Indian guide for Lewis and Clark, to keep him company, he’d be really lonely sitting there looking out over the vast waters of the Oahe Reservoir, created by damming the Missouri River of my youth. His monument was placed on the western bluffs about where the old highway bridge used to be when it was crossing only a river, the highway then climbing up to the prairie above.

Now the bridge and the river were only pictures in my memory. The wind was chilly and I had juice left in my camera for only one or two more pictures. So I took a shot of the water with Mobridge in the background. Then I picked my way down the old trail leading to the water, where the bridge used to be those many years ago. How strange. The remnants of the two-lane highway looked much narrower from side to side than I remembered. I got to the bottom—sure enough, littered with beer cans and bottles, a condom or two. So I took a quick peek and turned around. So much for nostalgia. On the way back up, I thought about the times I used to drive up to Sacajawea’s monument to park and neck with one of the girlfriends from my youth. But looking back on it from the vantage of my seventy-plus years, that probably wasn’t so great either—much wider in memory than it must have actually been: all those fumbling moves, the anxiety, the runny noses from our omnipresent winter colds, my ignorance of sex and affairs of the flesh. Now they’re all gone along with the bridge and the river of my youth.

Nebraska

I felt like a kid back in 1939, seeing The Wizard of Oz for the first time and being so disappointed at the black and white of the opening scenes, having looked forward so much to my first experience with the new-fangled Technicolor. But then Dorothy and Toto landed in Oz and the magical colors began. We just saw Bruce Dern in Nebraska. It could have been filmed only in black and white. From Billings, Montana, to South Dakota and down to Hawthorne, Nebraska. It could only be in black and white. The starkness of that prairie land, the desolation of those little towns along the way, the shabbiness of the houses and Main Street stores. It had to be in black and white. People not from one of those Midwestern prairie states wouldn’t be able to identify with this film the way that I and Rosalie could. After the closing credits, when we were all leaving the theatre, we heard people all around us telling others what state they were from—Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, the Dakotas—and chuckling over their shared memories of growing up in places exactly like Hawthorne, Nebraska. Just as the Coen brothers had to make Fargo in black and white, Nebraska also had to be. Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) was also a study in black and white, with wispy feathers of gray hair blowing in the chill winter breeze, gray scraggly beard, enough gray nose hair protruding that it could have been braided. And all the relatives were black and white characters, with black and white lives behind them and black and white lives in front of them. Aside from the many laughs the audience got from Woody’s foolish quest to get the million dollars he thought he’d won, this was a most depressing film depicting empty lives and lost dreams. The landscape featured fallow fields and deserted backroads, leafless black trees silhouetted against gray skies. Woody’s wife Kate (June Squibb) and their two sons David (Will Forte) and Ross (Bob Odenkirk) visited the old homestead house outside of Hawthorne where Woody was born and grew up. It was a shell with broken furniture and peeling walls and I could almost smell the dust and mold and decay. It was like Woody’s life, empty and decaying and just waiting to collapse. Three adjectives for this film: funny, good (especially Dern’s depiction of Woody), depressing.

Her

The question, really, is about love—what it is, what makes it a peculiarly human affliction. We went to see Her yesterday. I loved it, Rosalie hated it. She couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me why she hated it, just that it seemed so unlikely that someone could fall in love with a computer. Then she added, “But you seem to be in love with your computer, all the time you spend with it. So I guess that isn’t so farfetched.” But back to love and how it relates to Her. The story is set in a not-too-distant future in which Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) works in a place much like Hallmark, where he writes letters for people who hire him for that task. He sits all day in front of a computer, talking to it, having it write in the buyer’s handwriting, on individualized stationery, what the buyer, apparently, can’t say for himself, at least not as feelingly and beautifully as Theodore can. That’s pretty much what Hallmark cards now do. Her seems to be set in a time when there’s no more poverty and everyone walks around with an earbud (much like what we now have with Bluetooth buds) and tiny computers they look at and converse with (much like what we now have with the proliferation of Smart Phones). It’s a world where people can play video games with 3-d images on holographic devices hovering in the air in front of them (much like the increasingly realistic video games we now have). Theodore is in the middle of divorce proceedings and isn’t yet able to finalize the divorce. He just can’t sever his ties to the woman he once loved. He’s a loner who lives more inside his computer than in the real world outside. He sees an advertisement for a new computer app that would give him a personalized voice called OS1 (operating system) that would be at his beck and call. Everyone who signs up for this service is assigned a voice that was personalized just for him. Theodore’s OS calls herself Samantha (the voice of Scarlet Johanson) who tells him she has just read through a book of names and chose that name because it sounded nice. It took her just under one second to read the entire book. They converse, he learning about Samantha, she learning about Theodore (with a lot of help from his e-mails and his biographical details stored on the internet). She has a voice that sounds delightfully human even though he knows she isn’t really real, a voice much like what we have now with Siri, the computer voice that speaks directly to the one using a computer or driving a car, writing what he says, giving him directions to places, setting reminders of meetings and appointments. Raj, in The Big Bang Theory, fell in love with Siri, and we laughed at his naiveté. What we see in Her is a glimpse of what we might have in the near future. I can’t think we’re so far behind a time when the technologists and computer nerds won’t be able to create an artificial intelligence with access to the world’s knowledge, a being that can think and learn on its own, relating to humans just like another human relates. A long time ago, Isaac Asimov wrote about this very thing in his I, Robot series. Current television shows consider the same things in Almost Human and Intelligence. This movie was all about love. What if I were a blind quadriplegic, unable to see or touch or feel the one I was communicating with. Could I possibly fall in love with that being? Is a physical relationship necessary for two people (or artificial beings) to fall in love? Could I love more than one person, or voice? Would I be jealous if that voice I loved told me he/she loved more than just me, like maybe as many as 687 others (as Samantha tells Theodore)? Good questions, and ones we’d better be prepared to answer, because this kind of future is just around the corner, just a day or two away.

August: Osage County

I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to catch up on all the new movies I want to see, especially the ones that are getting Oscar attention. I flipped a few coins and decided to see August: Osage County. I mean, how can one forego any performance by Meryl Streep? And as a bonus, the side dish Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts. Osage County, Oklahoma, flat as a prairie can be and desolate as tired wind through telephone wires. It takes place in a dark, beat up farmhouse, Violet Weston (Meryl Streep) stumbling down stairs to confront her husband Beverly (What kind of parents would stick a son with the name Beverly?) who is hiring a young Native American girl to care for his ailing wife. Her face is pasty white and wrinkled, her eyes red-rimmed, her hair gray and ratty like someone had cut it with sheep shears. We learn that she has cancer of the mouth (How appropriate and symbolic is that?) but she retains her shrill, nastiness when she speaks to Beverly. Flash forward to Beverly (Sam Shepard) going out on a nearby lake and drowning himself. Flash forward again to the arrival of three daughters and their significant others—Barbara Weston (Julia Roberts), Ivy Weston (Julianne Nicholson), Karen Weston (Juliette Lewis), Charlie Aiken (Chris Cooper) and his wife Mattie Fae Aiken (Margo Martindale), Violet’s sister, Bill Fordham (Ewen McGregor), Barbara’s estranged husband, their daughter Jean Fordham (Abigail Breslin, no longer “little Miss Sunshine”), and Little Charlie Aiken (Benedict Cumberbatch). They have all except Little Charlie just returned from Beverly Weston’s funeral. It’s a family get-together that echoes Tennessee Williams, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The food and dishes fly everywhere, the verbal bombs from one member to another find their marks, and Violet Weston is shrillest and strongest (according to her own assessment) of them all. She is hooked on prescription pain medication and she smokes almost continuously, almost sexually admiring the smoke and flame of her cigarettes as she prepares another volley to fire at her children and her sister. It’s one screwed up family. The review in Entertainment Weekly made two points about this movie with which I must agree: the distance between an audience and the actors on stage in the Broadway play could better cope with the invective than a movie audience having to see and hear these people close up, face to face (and not very attractive faces at that); and I found myself simply watching these people more as actors than as people in Osage County, Oklahoma. Meryl Streep is a great actress, but I kept thinking about all the gestures and facial tics as pre-planned. The same was true of the others, a great cast doing some great acting. But I was unable to willingly suspend my disbelief. Streep will certainly be nominated again for this role, and she may even win it. But I’ll be rooting for Cate Blanchett for her role in Blue Jasmine.

Jack Jones

One of my favorite male singers (second only to Old Blue Eyes) is Jack Jones. When I saw that he’d be performing at the Arizona Broadway Theatre, I couldn’t resist, even though I knew he was now an old dude like me and probably could no longer sing very well. Right on one count: He’ll be 76 tomorrow, and his hair is a piled-high drift of snow and his gait has one or two hitches, but he stayed upright and sang for just over ninety minutes. Not bad for an old dude. And I was wrong on one count: He can still sing up a storm. All the high notes were still there, all the sustained notes, all the volume he needed. Before he came on stage, we were treated to a twenty-minute tape of his career highlights—clips from some of the movies he’d made and tv guest appearances, an especially good segment singing with a very young Shirley Bassey on one of his signature songs, “Here’s That Rainy Day.” Then he appeared, backed by piano, bass, keyboard, and drums. A few oldies mixed in with a bunch I’d never heard him sing. Highlights included “Wives and Lovers” for which he’d won a Grammy. He explained that he’d gotten a bunch of letters from various women’s groups pleading that he never again sing that song because it was so demeaning to women, painting them as only housewives while their husbands went out to earn the living. You know, “Wives should always be lovers too, run to his arms the moment he comes home to you.” He thought he should write new lyrics for it: “Hey, little boy, cap your teeth, get a hairpiece.” And a sensational set of two from Man of La Mancha, “I, Don Quixote” and “The Impossible Dream.” Later, he told us about the time he went to Paris to record songs by Michel Legrand, especially one with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, and I knew what was coming, maybe the best set of lyrics ever written, “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” The entire audience sighed as one when he began. His closing featured a medley of two that said something about our need for world peace, John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Julie Gold’s “From a Distance.” It was a wonderful evening of songs by one of the greatest voices in the modern era.

Practical & Impractical Jokes

My sister sent me a book for my first Christmas in Korea, H. Allen Smith’s The Compleat Practical Joker. That was in 1953 and I had just turned twenty. She and I had very similar senses of humor and she was sure I’d appreciate a book of practical jokes. Smith, in his forward, suggested that probably the first such joke wasn’t so much a joke as it was an attempt at physical humor, but humor only for the joker, but a kind of cruelty for the jokee. It’s the “goose,’ a gesture as ancient as man. Some people are goosie and some are not. It’s always the goosies who get the goose bacause that’s what the gooser finds delightfully funny—to see someone leap in anguished frenzy when someone sneaks up behind him and jabs, or gooses, him in the butt. I think it’s a joke for bullies, in that same category as giving someone a wedgie or stuffing him in a locker or giving him a swirlie (head in toilet), noogies, pantsing, nipple crippling, towel snapping, wet willies and putting a “kick me” sign on the back. A catalogue of Three Stooges stuff. True practical jokes don’t have to rely on cruelty to be funny. Smith tells of a time when he decided to tie a piece of string around his ear with the other end in his mouth. He wanted to see how many people would notice it and if anyone would ask him why. He could go whole days with everyone secretly looking at him but no one asking. Finally, aboard a plane, a young man came up to him and asked him, hesitatingly, what the string was for. Before boarding, a friend of Smith’s had given him some kumquats to take home with him. On the spur of the moment, Smith explained that he was involved in an experiment to see how certain fruits affected the gastric process and that he and his colleagues had each been assigned a citrus fruit, each to eat nothing but that citrus for a week, with a tiny gold bucket attached to a string and lowered into the stomach. Once a day he would retrieve the bucket and send the contents to a lab. His assigned fruit was the kumquat, at which time he took one out of his pocket and offered it to the young man. The joy of the joke was in considering how the young man would spread the story to his friends, and they to other friends, the story of the strange scientist who had a gold bucket in his stomach.

Card Tricks

Mr. Wizard reminded me of other card tricks I’ve known across the years. About sixty years ago, when I was in Korea, an army buddy showed us a trick in which he had one of us select a pair cards from ten sets of pairs he laid out facedown. The chooser was to memorize the two cards. Then he picked them all up and laid them out, face up, in four rows of five cards each. Then he asked which row or rows the two cards were. Then he told us what the two cards were. Amazing. How did he do it? I finally paid him $20 to reveal the secret. You have to understand, twenty bucks sixty years ago was a bunch of money. And, in this age of the World Wide Web, I could have found the answer without paying out good money. But then I thought it was worth it. I was young and stupid. What did I know? The trick depends on four words: bible, atlas, goose, thigh. In putting out the cards, the trickster places them on a grid conforming to those four words. Whatever row or rows the person says will contain the ones duplicated in the letters of the words. The trick is to put out the cards as fast as possible without looking like there’s any pattern to the layout. That takes practice. And without knowing the words, there’s no way anyone can see how it’s done. I got the four words for five buck apiece, and spent a lot of time practicing the grid. The old con games with the walnut shells and 3-card Monte take the same kind of practice, but I was never very good at either of those.

Another game my wife and I played at parties in the past had me lay out six, eight or ten cards, face up in two or three rows. I’d send Rosalie out of the room, then have someone choose one of the cards. She’d come back and I would then touch each of the cards and ask her which one was chosen. She would tell us the right card. We could do that two or three times before someone told me not to touch any of the cards. Okay. So when she came back, she could still point to the correct card. This could go on for up to an hour. At first, when I touched the cards, I would touch whichever card had the same number of pips as the pattern of the layout, touch the pip that corresponded to the card chosen. If there were ten cards, I’d lay them out in three rows, four in the outer rows and two in the middle, conforming to the pips on the ten that I’d included in the laid out cards. When the tricked person decided that the secret lay in the way I was touching the cards, I’d agree not to touch them. But when Rosalie came back in the room, she’d surreptitiously look to see how I was holding a cigarette (in those old days when folks still smoked indoors at a house party)—pointing left, right, or neutral to indicate which row, fingers holding it at top or bottom or part way in between to indicate which card in that row. The same could be done with a pencil or pen. Ah, the good old card-trick days. Now I have to trick myself into going to sleep and waking up.

Mr. Wizard

Another strange middle-of-the-night memory. Why on earth do I too often half awaken at 3:00 a.m. and have my mind wander hither and yon? Last night, I thought about my daughter Laura, who would occasionally call me and ask to speak to Mr. Wizard. These calls were often years and years apart, and I remember panicking, trying to remember what I was supposed to do. Mr. Wizard is an old card trick you may have used or had used on you, and it’s one of the all-time best amateur (non-magician) tricks ever devised. Lots of card tricks have to be pre-planned or set up before springing them. But Mr. Wizard is all set up and ready to go any time or any place. Here’s the simple explanation for those not familiar with this trick. The phone rings. Laura says to me, “Hello, can I speak to Mr. Wizard?” at which I stumblingly say slowly, “Ace, two, three, four . . .” etc. Laura interrupts at the proper spot by saying, “Yes, Mr. Wizard?” and I say, slowly, “Clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades.” She interrupts, again at the proper spot, and says, “There’s someone here who would like to ask you a question.” She gives the phone to the one being tricked and the charade continues, with me speaking in a spooky, portentous voice, something like, “You wish me to tell you what card you’ve chosen? Are you looking at it and envisioning it? Ah, I see that it’s the seven . . . of clubs.” The tricked-upon usually screams, “Oh, my God! That's incredible! How’d you do that?” Then I add a few spooky comments about needing a rest after that mental exercise and hang up. Good trick, especially if it can be done without much time passing between our exchanges. And it’s especially impressive if there’s no preliminary situation or party where such a trick is introduced. For example, let’s say you’re sitting in a bar and you hear some strangers discussing clairvoyance or telepathy and you casually interject that you know someone who can read cards from a distance. And then the game begins.

A few years ago, Laura called me to pull this trick on her manager at a day care school where Laura was working. The woman was astounded at my telling her the card she’d chosen. But then she persisted with other questions, like how many children did she have. I guessed at two (a likely number) and she said yes, that’s right. And then I went on to tell her that one of them had recently asked her advice about something. A good guess since nearly all children ask for a parent’s advice, even though they then never take it. She excitedly told me all about it. I didn’t press my luck any further with my clairvoyance and made my telephonic escape. Laura later told me the woman wanted to know how she could contact this Mr. Wizard for a further fortune reading. Needless to say, Laura never told her it was just a trick. I miss Mr. Wizard. I wish I’d get a call from daughter Laura asking for him. Now that I’m old and forgetful, I’d probably really screw up the routine, but it would be nice despite the stumbling screw up.

Winter Olympics 2014

Soon we’ll be watching countless hours of Winter Olympics coverage in Sochi, Russia. Let’s just hope it isn’t marred by any terrorist suicide bombings such as has been going on there this past week. I have yet to figure out why rational people would do such things. But then, they aren’t rational to begin with. These games will be without Lindsey Vonn, who wisely decided that her knee just wasn’t up to the downhill stress. This year I’ll probably watch less of it than I have in past Olympics. There’s just so much I can’t relate to or understand—like the luge (flat on the back aboard a tiny sled, feet first, hurtling down a track at frightening speeds, the winner after two runs determined by tiny fractions of a second), the skeleton (just like the luge only belly down and headfirst), the biathlon (that strange combination of cross country skiing and rifle marksmanship), and curling (a little like watching paint dry). I’m really interested only in the figure skating.

Oh, how I used to pull for the lovely Michelle Kwan, who could never quite win the gold. Skaters from the past remain vivid in my mind: Peggy Fleming and her aristocratic beauty, Dorothy Hamill and her Hamill-cut hair, square-faced Katarina Witt, the nasty Tonya Harding in her feud with Nancy Kerrigan, tiny Tara Lipinski, the whirling Kristi Yamaguchi, athletic Brian Boitano, the back somersaulting Scott Hamilton, and, of course, the sensational dance pair of Jayne Torvill and Chistopher Dean doing “Bolero” in 1984. But I’m sure I’ll watch some of the speed skating and the gymnastic tricks of the snowboarders. Just can’t get as excited about the winter games as I do the summer games. And now no Lindsey Vonn. And, please, you maniacs, don’t blow anyone up.

BCS BS

The end of the BCS bullshit (BCS BS), and it ended with a most exciting game between the Auburn Tigers and the Florida State Seminoles to earn the right to call themselves the best college team of 2013. Auburn deserved to win but lost it in the last minute and nineteen seconds when the Seminoles took it on a long drive to a winning touchdown. Auburn had only to stop them somewhere in that final seventy-nine seconds but couldn’t get the job done. That’s the difference between winners and losers. Winners come through in the clutch and losers let it happen. But at least we’ve seen the last of the BCS. Next year we have a four-team playoff which will be a much fairer system for determining a national champion. I have to comment on the Seminoles: In an age when Native Americans object to the name of the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves , and the Cleveland Indians as demeaning to them, why isn’t there an equal disapproval of the Florida State Seminoles?

Anyone attending the game and not an FS fan or watching it on the tube had to be really sick of the continuous tomahawk chops and Native American chanting from the Seminole fans. I know I was. Also, while on the subject of college and pro football, why must so many players have to scream and pound their chests and do a little dance whenever they’ve made a tackle or sacked the quarterback? It’s like they’re playing to the camera, “Look at me! Look at me! I’m soooo good!” Why not just get up and get ready for the next play? I think all coaches—high school, college, NFL— should make it a point to discourage such behavior, maybe even take the miscreant out of the game or at the next practice make him run a hundred laps or do a thousand pushups. Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals is a perfect example of what behavior should be. When he catches a pass for a touchdown, he quietly hands the ball to the referee and then goes on about his business—no spiking the ball over the cross bar on the goal posts, no pre-planned dance or celebration. Just a “This is my job, this is what I do, so let’s get on with it.” That’s classy. Thank you, Larry Fitzgerald.

I'm Back with Pot & Wolf of Wallstreet

Okay, so I couldn’t take even a full week off. Blog writing becomes addictive, and I’m hooked. I thought I’d run out of topics but there is no end to possible topics. And I’m still seeing movies and reading books that I can review. And local and national and world news still has enough stories about stupidity and stupid people to keep me in fodder for a long time to come.

One of the top recent stories has Colorado making pot legal for recreational use. And that’s probably just the beginning as more and more states will likely follow suit. It remains to be seen if this will result in increased addiction to what was an illegal substance, which may lead to more people moving on to the harder illegal substances. Cigarettes are legal. Do they cause smokers to move on to heroine and coke? Booze is legal. Does it cause drinkers to move on to harder stuff? In both cases I don’t think so. Nor will legalizing pot lead to a nation of pot heads.

And speaking of potheads, I just saw Leonardo DiCaprio, as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, doing coke and ludes as though he was in druggie heaven. Whoa, three hours of nudity and F-bombs and drugs and booze and money in every scene. DiCaprio did his best imitation of Jack Nicholson’s brazen, screaming self as he sold and scammed his way through Wall Street, igniting his fellow stock salesmen and women to pick up those phones and sell, sell, sell penny stocks that netted them all 50% of the stocks’ values. The audience couldn’t figure out whether to root for him or despise him. But what a salesman he was and what an energetic hip-hop three hours of acting on his part. If you can’t stomach almost continuous bad language and nudity and graphic sexual intercourse, don’t see this movie. But if you want to watch DiCaprio strut his acting stuff, go see him as the Wolf of Walstreet.